How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website?
When commissioning the construction of a website, we rarely think about how much it costs to maintain a website – whether there are any cyclical costs related to its existence. Unfortunately, they exist and affect every owner of a website, portal, or online store: fixed costs are:
• domain
• hosting
• SSL certificate
A domain is nothing more than the rental of an internet name, e.g., www.yourname.pl. It cannot be purchased outright; prices start at around 60 PLN per year and go up to several hundred PLN per year. Think carefully when “purchasing” such a lease whether it’s worth investing in various exotic domain extensions (e.g..website .shop etc.) because they are terribly expensive to renew.
If you, for example, launch a website of a service company operating in the UK, buy a domain (lease) www.yourname.co.uk or www.yourname.uk as it will cost around 120-140 PLN per year to renew. If you’re launching an online store that will sell globally and operate in English, look into domains like www.yourname.com or www.yourname.net which will cost around 60 PLN per year to renew.
Pay attention to this when buying a domain; often there are promotions for various exotic extensions offered at 9.99 PLN or a symbolic PLN, sometimes the price of renewal for a year is displayed next to it. If it doesn’t appear, check online how much it costs to renew a domain with a given extension to avoid a surprise the following year. Domain extensions have no significance; choose simple domain names that are easy to remember and cheapest extensions like .pl .de .com .net etc. depending on the country you’re building your website for.
How Much Does It Cost to Maintain a Website?
Domain registrars often offer several alternative domain extensions in a package for a few PLN during domain purchase; don’t do this – they’re useless unless you plan to launch a company that will become a global corporation (although even then, it’s not much of an issue).
Buy just one domain with the highest level extension for the country where you plan to conduct business. That’s all.
Hosting – This is nothing more than the place where your website files are stored; hosting affects how much it costs to maintain a website, databases and company mail, some people think they can launch a website on their home computer, theoretically yes, but such a computer would have to be always turned on, and in the internet, your website would be visible by its IP address not domain name, that’s why there are hosting companies which are entities that build data centers where servers are placed, which offer such services for a small annual fee. Such a data center must have redundant power supply, backup power supply, necessary firewalls, technical support to maintain the infrastructure.
You can buy the cheapest hosting package from 300 PLN per year; you’ll often get it for several dozen PLN in the first year.
SSL certificate (so-called lock) – This also affects how much it costs to maintain a website, it’s something more than just a lock that we’re usually associated with, it’s a certificate that ensures encryption of client-server communication or transmission between your website visitors and your website, for example when transmitting personal data via a contact form, such a transmission is encrypted. Some hosting companies force you to buy paid SSL certificates during domain registration and hosting which are given almost for free in the first year, but cost extra next year on top of domain and hosting fees plus 140 PLN per year.
Fortunately, there are alternatives; most hosting companies offer free SSL certificates (Let’s Encrypt) so pay attention when registering your hosting whether it has such a certificate included. If you do, you can skip buying a paid SSL certificate.
These are the only fixed costs that every website owner must bear.
There may also be advertising costs in the internet unless you have knowledge of this subject yourself.
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